Just a short thought for today.
I overheard a conversation this week between two of my coworkers talking about education degrees. The conversation revolved around needing a degree in a certain subject to be successful in a specific field. This seed of an idea got me thinking – is that statement really true? Are there specific things that can only be learned in school?
If you think about the essence of school – it’s really just a place where you get to read books and talk to really smart people. I would argue that I do both of those things every day! On top of that, many resources used in schools have now been made publicly available through the power of digital technology (e.g. Harvard’s Justice course they put on youTube http://www.justiceharvard.org/). You can do so much learning for free, it makes it seem silly to pay increasingly expensive tuition fees to learn.
From a hiring perspective, it certainly is easier to just look at degrees and statistics – and having advanced degrees is probably positively correlated to being a smart capable person. However, many of the most successful people in the world today, lack even college degrees (I suppose Bill Gates would be the cliché example here).
Let me know what you think.